What Makes NixOS Different (And Why It's Worth It)
Like many kiwis at the time, my partner and I were preparing for a shift overseas. She was finishing her master’s and had just accepted a job offer; I was preparing for certifications, juggling work and the move admin, about to start my own job hunt. As I was studying, a notification popped up; for some reason, that seemed the perfect time to try updating Ubuntu on my home machine.
I knew it was dangerous; I thought a few packages might break, and my third-party repositories would stop working. Instead, my screen filled with errors, and the install was bricked. Either OpenSSL hadn’t installed correctly, or some part of the system boot was depending on an older version. Whatever the cause, it was a bigger mystery than I had time for.
My fallback environments were an old Windows install and a laptop with hardware issues. The first freeze during an exam I dealt with; by the second, I was on edge. Cue a few nervous digital interviews - I was keen to keep them short.
In the end, it all worked out. And when I sat down to fix my home desktop a few months later, reinstalling Ubuntu was an easy enough fix. That just wasn’t how I wanted to spend my time regularly - I wanted to freely tinker, and NixOS was my answer.
